标题: 2022.02.23 我丢失了袜子、手缝的兔子--和信任 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-3-4 05:57 标题: 2022.02.23 我丢失了袜子、手缝的兔子--和信任 STRANGER THINGS
I’ve lost socks, a hand-sewn rabbit – and trust
Should I abandon hope of ever finding them again?
Feb 23rd 2022
BY ANN WROE
Confined by covid a few weeks ago, I decided to do a sock census. The census involves tipping the top drawer of my dressing table onto the bed and trying to pair them up. This is trickier than it sounds, because I only buy socks in black, and the variations which distinguish the tops of them (wide, narrow, ribbed, plain, elasticated or past it) are subtle. Two things alone are certain. There will be fewer than there used to be, and almost none will find a partner matching in all respects.
I can never understand this. I don’t throw socks away and actually like darning them, making use of a smooth Victorian mushroom and an almost prehistoric needle. I wash them by hand, not in a machine, so they can’t perform their tricks of vaporising, dissolving, sprinting down pipes or whatever else they do to avoid returning home. The days are gone when I used to find mysterious strays, fossilised into hard balls, under the beds and in the kit-bags of my sons. I can only conclude that getting lost, and staying there, is part of the life-cycle of the sock.
Getting lost, and staying there, is part of the life-cycle of the sock
And not of socks alone. Long-term or permanent vanishing is bizarrely common. Whatever happened, for example, to the credit and membership cards I stowed prudently away before a trip once, after I was robbed at LaGuardia? When I got back I marched confidently to get them from their hiding place – in the sock drawer, as it happens – and they were gone. No burglars had called, no subsidence had shifted things, even the ever-hungry moths don’t feast on plastic. It was just a case of “into thin air”.
That air must be plumping up nicely, as it also contains a fair number of Christmas Presents Bought in Advance. These are the items that looked ideal in April or June, stirring up all sorts of preening thoughts about providence and time-saving. So they were put away sensibly (in the postcard drawer, I’m sure) and inevitably, by December, lost. One, a very fancy Mercedes key-fob, turned up ten years later in the umbrella bucket, when we had long since downgraded to a Ford. How the mighty had fallen.
Whenever a wonder-hoard of coins or weapons is uncovered by detectorists, experts tend to say that it was buried at a time of danger, implying that the owners fled in a panic. An alternative possibility is that they were under no duress, just being careful and, after that, forgetful. When they came confidently back the forest looked different, plants had grown up and their markers had moved somehow; so, after many circles, they gave up searching. It seems to me that, as with my credit cards, the chance of losing something for ever is in direct proportion to the amount of care expended on getting it and putting it away.
Every ancient brooch or coin found by itself still carries a charge of grief
Presents, especially socks, can always be bought again, and we put the loss out of our minds. But in the case of precious items hope keeps going, living and reliving the last moments of seeing and touching them before they disappeared. Every ancient brooch or coin found by itself still carries, along with fascination, a charge of grief. The horse has been halted, the grass searched, the kerchief unwound from the neck, every receptacle turned inside out. Again and again the owner paces out the ground, or gets servants to do so, but the ground has apparently yawned once and closed again. It will reveal the ring or the jewel only to Stan or Dave, centuries later, as they spend a Sunday morning sweeping a hill with cigarettes dangling and their machines randomly beeping. In future years or decades someone will find the keys I lost on Hampstead Heath, exactly where the uncut grass met the mown field, below a particular oak tree. An easy place, you might think, but they were swallowed as completely as if I had dropped them in the ocean.
Such vanishings are hard to forget. The toy rabbit my grandmother made for me, everything hand-sewn down to the carrot in her apron pocket, disappeared when we moved house and ever since I have been haunted by her. Regret has only grown sharper the further I get from childhood. Why did other things sail through the move, like the fancy figurines I didn’t care about? Is she still in the old house somewhere, in some cobwebby corner in the dark? A strange belief grows that lost things are only waiting, in some limbo of suspended existence, for the moment when the right door is opened, the right box thrust open to the light, and they will live again in my life.
I’ve revisited the most likely rabbit-box several times, as if I must have been too cursory all those times before. She is still not there, though the unloved pinching shoes I wore at my wedding still are. Gloomily, I suppose that by some vicious directive of Fate I am meant to be separated from the precious things I lose. The strange myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where he looks back and loses the wife he is leading out of hell, is often read as a foolish attempt to retrieve the irretrievable past. Orpheus is meant to move on and Eurydice, his possession, to fade; the hands that were once his, Ovid writes, are his no longer. Having and losing is how life is.
Miracles do happen. A soft toy resembling a bumble bee, much loved by the boys when little, turned up after six years in a saucepan in the attic; they were horribly embarrassed when I erupted, waving both bee and pan, into their seriously cool teenage kickabout. My pocket Spanish dictionary, lost for two years, was found in my sewing box (why?), along with an Advance Present. Even partners to socks sometimes reappear and are gloriously reunited, Plato’s divided souls made one again with a firm twist of their tops.
Lost things are only waiting, in a limbo of suspended existence, for the moment when the right door is opened
Some lost things, too, turn out to be hiding in plain sight. A small yellow jug, much mourned as a rare memento of my college-garret days, was found humbly holding pens and brushes on a shelf behind my bedroom door. The weeping man I saw running along the platform at Brighton station was wearing his lost Ray-Bans on his head, but didn’t realise. An ancient art-supplies shop for which I had already written a tender mental obituary turned up, run-down as ever, in a different street. Part of me is still sure it was never there before.
The tricksiness of all this bothers me. Sleight of hand seems to be going on, without a conjuror behind it. As with poltergeists, objects even as large as shops are moving round of their own volition. Since I find such thoughts too creepy, I keep returning to the conclusion that the blame for long-term vanishings can only lie with me. It’s not just carelessness, it’s a case of shifting things in imagination, selectively forgetting and reinventing, misrepresenting the past. I’ve even caught myself looking for things which, after a little thought, I remember I decided not to buy anyway. I feed on dreams and search for ghosts, as Orpheus stared after the phantom of his wife.
And I remain trapped in the human tragedy that most things, when long lost, will never reappear. They include trust in, and respect for, the political leaders who are meant to guide and govern us. But that, at least, is truly not my fault.■
